The Diverse Book Awards were set up by award-winning author Abiola Bello and award-winning publicist Helen Lewis to highlight the year’s outstanding diverse and inclusive books. Take a look at these shortlisted titles for teens and young adults, all free to borrow with your library card!
Want more suggestions? Browse our recommendations.
Dancers of the Dawn
Zulekhá A. Afzal
Deep in the desert, under the blazing sun, an elite troupe of dancers are trained to harness their magic. They are the queen’s most formidable assassins. Aasira has one of the rarest talents – for she is a flame-wielder. Feared by all and envied by some, she uses her power to execute enemies of the crown. Aasira’s greatest wish is to serve her queen.
But on the eve of her graduation, with tensions rising among the dancers and secrets stirring in the shifting sand dunes, she begins to question whether she was truly born to kill.
Desi Girl Speaking
A. S. Hussain
Tweety is struggling. Battling depression and faced with parents and friends who don’t fully understand what’s happening, sixteen-year-old Tweety feels like no one is listening and there’s nowhere to turn to. Until she stumbles across Desi Girl Speaking, a podcast by someone else who’s struggling too.
Through episodes and exchanged emails, Tweety and Desi Girl begin to confide in each other, but as Tweety’s depression deepens, she’ll have to decide whether to stay silenced or use her voice to speak up.
I Never Shall Fall in Love
Hari Conner
George has always been in love with their best friend, Eleanor – and has always tried to ignore it.
Now Eleanor is coming of age and expected to marry a suitable man, it doesn’t matter how George feels – they have to let her go. Besides, George is busy avoiding their aunt’s matchmaking, taking over the failing family estate, and trying to keep their dressing in men’s clothes a secret.
Eleanor has always wanted to do everything ‘right,’ including falling in love – but she’s never met a boy she’s interested in. She’s more concerned with finding the perfect match for her cousin Charlotte, and working out why George is suddenly pulling away. But Eleanor’s friendships seem to be falling apart, and she’s beginning to realise that she likes George more than any man she’s met at a ball…
If My Words Had Wings
Danielle Jawando
When fifteen-year-old Tyrell Forrester gets caught up in a high-profile armed robbery, he’s sentenced to eighteen months in a young offenders’ prison. Now he’s getting out, and he’s determined to turn his life around. Despite his release, systemic discrimination makes it difficult for Ty to truly be free.
Inspired by a visiting poet while inside, Ty discovers a whole new world through spoken word and is finally finding his voice. But will society ever see him as anything other than a criminal?
King of Nothing
Nathanael Lessore
Anton and his friends are the kings of Year 9. They’re used to ruling the school and Anton wears the crown. The other kids run away when he’s about but that’s the way he wants it – he’s got a reputation to live up to after all. So when he gets into serious trouble at school, he doesn’t really care, but his mum most definitely does. She decides it’s time for Anton to make some new friends and join the Happy Campers, a local activity group. Anton would quite literally rather do anything else, especially when he finds out Matthew, the biggest loser in school, is also a member.
But after Matthew unexpectedly saves Anton’s life, Anton figures maybe this kid is worth a shot. Teaching him some game is the least Anton can do to repay the debt. As the boys strike up an unlikely friendship, Anton finds himself questioning everything he thought was important.
Not for the Faint of Heart
Lex Croucher
Mariel, a newly blooded captain of the Merry Men, is desperate to live up to the legacy of her grandfather, the legendary Robin Hood. Clem, a backwoods assistant healer known for her new-fangled cures, just wants to help people. When Mariel’s ramshackle band kidnap Clem as retribution for her guardian helping the Sheriff of Nottingham, all seems to be going (sort of) to plan – until Jack Hartley, Mariel’s father and Commander of the Merry Men, is captured in a deadly ambush.
Determined to prove herself, Mariel sets out to get him back – with her annoyingly cheerful kidnappee in tow. But the wood is at war. Many believe the Merry Men are no longer on the right side of history. Watching Clem tend the party’s wounds, Mariel begins to doubt the cause to which she has devoted her life.
Some Like It Cold
Elle McNicoll
After a long absence, 18-year-old Jasper is finally heading home for the holidays – and she’s keeping secrets. Arthur, a budding filmmaker, is turning the town of Lake Pristine into a small town story worthy of the big screen. His plans are disrupted by the arrival of the town’s golden girl – the antagonist of his school days; a girl he’s never forgotten. Jasper Montgomery is back in Lake Pristine for one reason: to say goodbye.
But before long small-town tensions start to rise, and a certain brooding film buff starts to look like a very big reason to stay.
The Boy Next Door
Jenny Ireland
Now she wasn’t Molly Cassidy, St Anne’s pain-in-the-hole princess. She was nine-year-old Molly who was my best friend in the whole world. Nobody had put her in the recovery position. All these people and they’d just left her like that. I held her hand until the ambulance came. Finbar and Molly live next door to each other. When they were children, they spent hours and hours together. They were best friends. Until they weren’t.
Now 18, Fin and Molly move in very different circles. Molly is popular, pretty, dating the most handsome boy in the whole school. Fin has one friend and he’s pretty sure he hates his dad and his little sister. At a party one night, though, they’re pulled together in a way neither of them expects and then follows a year that will see them experiencing life-changing challenges, friendships, love and everything in between.
The Thread That Connects Us
Ayaan Mohamud
A story of shared blood and bad blood, endings and beginnings Safiya has struggled to pick up the pieces of her family since her dad left them and moved to Somalia. She refuses to trust in love, despite wishing she could fall for boy-next-door Yusuf. And then her dad moves back to town with his new family, shattering her life all over again. Halima doesn’t want to move to England. She resents her stepdad for dropping her in a strange new life with a new language to learn – replacing her friends with bullies who set out to shame her.
When the girls are thrown together at school, it’s hate at first sight. But as they uncover life-changing secrets from their parents’ past, they begin to realize. What if the key to all their problems lies in their sisterhood?
Wild East
Ashley Hickson-Lovence
When 14-year-old music-lover Ronny’s life gets messy, his mum decides they’re moving out of London. In Norwich, as a Black teenager in a mostly white school, Ronny feels like a complete outsider. He tries his best to balance keeping his head down, and his goal of becoming a rapper alive. But when a local poet comes into class, he opens Ronny’s world to something new. Rap is like spoken word, lyrics equal poetry – and maybe the combination of both could be the key to Ronny’s dreams?
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